Lectio Divina - One hundred and twelve

From The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 260.

Birdwings

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.

Lectio Divina - One hundred and eleven

Hadewijch of Antwerp, quoted in For Lovers of God Everywhere: Poems of the Christian Mystics, ed. Roger Housden, Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2009, 60.

The madness of love
Is a blessed fate;
And if we understood this
We would seek no other:
It brings into unity
What was divided,
And this is the truth:
Bitterness it makes sweet,
It makes the stranger a neighbor,
And what was lowly it raises on high.